An Evaluation of Vehicular Networks with Real Traces

We have developed an NS-2 simulation framework incorporating a large dataset of real GPS taxi traces collected from around 4000 taxis in Shanghai, China. Extensive simulations have been performed to explore the achievable performance of real vehicular networks. Simulation results show that a real vehicular network has surprisingly poor data delivery performance under wide network configurations, which strongly suggests that the challenging characteristics of vehicular networks, such as unique node mobility, constraints of road topology, need further exploration.